Some years ago we moved off of ADP to a payroll service hosted offsite. For all this time we have maintained the old ADP server because legal said that the data has to be kept indefinitely. At some point this feel impractical. Even with virtualization, I feel that we can't practically keep the server running indefinitely. I feel we would have to keep documentation on accessing the data (since everyone has forgotten by now after so many years), maintain backups, and deal with potential corruption or data loss at some point.

I am curious to know what other companies do with legacy data like this.

Do you guys usually maintain the server as a whole? Do you extract the data to a massive spreadsheet or something similar? Or is there some legal loophole that will allow us to get rid of the data entirely?

Just looking for some feedback from IT pros that have similar experiences.

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I work with clients in Pharma & Med Device industry who are required to hold data from various systems for up to 35 years. Maintaining source systems for this amount of time is impractical to say the least, and migration is the only feasible option. The migration process typically has to be validated (using a formal documented risk based approach) to ensure all data and metadata is properly transferred and has not lost any integrity. There are FDA regulations / expectations on how the data is managed, stored, the media and formats used, security, periodic access of records to ensure they have not been corrupted, etc.

Dumping data to a spreadsheet would not be acceptible for FDA and I don't believe it would be for your requirements either. Check with your legal guys to find out what specific regulations apply - I expect they include detail on formats, security, procedures, etc.

We did a p2v (MS Hyper-V), then locked the old ADP VHD down with snapshots to ensure no changes occurred. When our HR needs to access the old system, we spin the server up, give them access, then shut it down and roll back to original if they happened to make a change.

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